Edmund Burke's "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful"
This text is taken from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Burke's Philosophical and Historical Writings Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding of 1690 was the first attempt to give a survey of the mind's workings that was both comprehensive and post-aristotelian. It soon fostered intense interest in epistemology, psychology and ethics. Burke seems to have worked on the imagination — the faculty of devising and combining ideas — as an undergraduate, and continued to do so into the 1750s. The result, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) emphasized, unsurprisingly, the activity of mind in making ideas and the influence of these upon conduct. It was in the first place an exercise in clarifying ideas, with an eye to refining the ways in which the arts affect the passions: in other words, a refinement of complex ideas was taken to be the precondition of a refinement of practice. The roots of human activity, Burke thought, were the passions of curiosity, pleasure and pain. Curiosity stimulated the activity of mind on all matters. Ideas of pain and of pleasure corresponded respectively to self-preservation and society, and society involved the passions of sympathy, imitation and ambition. Imitation tended to establish habit, and ambition to produce change. Sympathy did neither, but it did establish an interest in other people's welfare that extended to mental identification with them. The scope of sympathy could embrace anyone, unlike compassion, which applied only to those in a worse situation than oneself. Such width of concern had an obvious reference to the social order (and may express also Burke's thinking about the theatre). The passions, understood in Burke's way, suggested at once that society as such answered to natural instincts, and that it comprised elements of continuity and improvement alike. Burke then proceeded to show that self-preservation and its cognates suggested the complex idea of the sublime, and not least the idea of a God who was both active and terrible. Beauty, on the other hand, comprised a very different set of simple ideas, which originated in pleasure. Sublime and beautiful therefore sprang from very different origins. The diverse views rejected by A Philosophical Enquiry were united by the pervasive assumption that human nature in an unschooled condition, as it came from the hand of nature, and understood without direct reference to God, was in some sense adequate to the human condition. Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality was at odds with Burke's view of the naturalness of society, and with his view that solitude, because unnatural, was a source of pain, as well as with Burke's position that sympathy, rather than merely compassion, was a key emotion. Burke's view that the mind formed ideas of beauty from the ideas of pleasure it received contradicted the view of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that beauty (like goodness) was a perception presented by a sixth or moral sense. Burke's further view that our simple ideas of pain went towards a complex idea of a God who inspired terror, was very distant from the deists' view that He could be understood by our natural faculty of reason alone and that as such He was known to be benevolent and not much besides. These three positions alike presumed that human faculties, unimproved by human effort and considered with little relation to God, were sufficient to inspire conduct. It is not surprising that Burke rejected them. Burke not only thought that nature needed improvement, but also recognized its ambiguity. Ambition, for instance, was the source of enterprise and of improvement: but Burke did not suppose that enterprise was in all its manifestations a benefit to its exponent, and indeed once called it ‘the cause of the greatest disappointments, miseries and misfortunes, and sometimes of dangerous immoralities’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/burke/notes.html#4 4. If Burke had a forward-looking mind, and believed that human nature both required and led to development, he did not think that progress was necessarily an unqualified gain: for instance, in discussing the civilizing of American savages, he saw a diminution of their courage as well as an increase in their moral goodness. A Philosophical Enquiry suggests that Burke was developing the loyalties of his youth through the medium of philosophical psychology. A God who presents Himself through nature in a way that is often found in the Bible, and who devises and sustains nature in a way that leads man to society and facilitates the improvement of that society, has set Himself to support Christianity, power and improvement, and probably education too. At the same time, however, other aspects of the book suggest that this support was delivered to them, not on their own terms, but on the terms of a philosophy which recognizes the ability of the imagination to transform people's understandings of themselves and society. Anyone who thinks in terms of complex ideas can see that these can be framed easily in different ways, none of which need correspond to anything found in the external world: combine the ideas of a man and a horse, and you have the idea of a centaur. No one who reads romances would find difficulty in imagining a society differing beyond recognition from its current arrangements. A classic instance of political imagination, indeed, is Burke's own Vindication of Natural Society, which presents as an alternative model of society an organization — if that is the word — devoid of civil government, church and significant private property.